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Abstract

In June 2012, UNESCO named the landscape of Grand Pré, Nova Scotia, a World Heritage
Site, as ‘exceptional testimony to a traditional farming settlement created in the
seventeenth century by the Acadians in a coastal zone with tides that are among the
highest in the world’. Grand Pré is the gateway to the Annapolis Valley, a rare stretch
of favourable soils and climate in a largely unarable province. From the early nineteenth
century onward, ambitions to make the Valley ‘the Orchard of the Empire’ resulted
in some of the most intensive rural development in Atlantic Canada. This transformed
the physical, ecological and economic landscape of Nova Scotia profoundly, and became
central to its sense of place in the global community. Its fields and orchards also
inspired a second industry: tourism, promoting, ironically, a decidedly non-industrial picture of blithe fertility and prosperity. In recent decades, both agriculture
and tourism in the region have created a new idyll, one that grafts the language of
sustainability onto the pastoral image of apple blossoms, and so successfully draws
attention away from the ecological costs and economic health of agriculture in the
region. With its focus on pre-industrial Acadian settlement, historical commemoration
at Grand Pré has the very real effect of affirming the possibility of local and sustainable
agriculture in the area today. But the pré is also part of another history, another set of agricultural practices that followed
the Acadians and that still frame most agricultural production in Nova Scotia. This
essay offers a second public narrative for Grand Pré, one that treats the site as
part of the Annapolis Valley as well as l’ancienne Acadie, part of an industrial landscape as well as an idyllic one. It is only by recognizing both histories that we can really appreciate
the realities of modern agriculture and the need for sustainable alternatives.